Please tell me you don't believe Wednesday's thunder and lightning was caused by some sort of weather front, as opposed to the discord tearing apart Simon Cowell's coven? If you fall into the kooky first category, then you are formally banned from reading further secrets of the Sisterhood of Simon. But if you are wise enough to fall into the second, then draw near, for these are bewitching times.

To recap, it is a matter of the most ostentatious public record that Simon Cowell is best friends with his ex-girlfriends Sinitta and Jackie St Claire. They accompany him to every day of Royal Ascot, along with the likes of Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden, and are frequently clamped either side of him at red-carpet events.

The entire arrangement just screams Witches of Eastwick, with the old karaoke devil in the role of Darryl Van Horne, and Sinitta and co as the women he seduces, causing them to give in to their awesome feminine potency.

It is Simon, you see, who has brought these ladies' powers – if we may risibly term them so – to fruition. Consider Sinitta. The erstwhile popstar was once engaged in writing a book about the largely chaste years she spent dating Cowell – but no sooner had he heard about it than he brought her into the fold, where she now gives a grateful new generation of X Factor talents the benefit of her considerable wisdom.

As for Jackie, it isn't immediately easy to put one's finger on what exactly it is she does, and it certainly doesn't seem the sort of matter upon which we should lavish more than three seconds of our attention. But suffice to say she makes herself highly visible, and was only this week seen cackling arm-in-arm with Simon's latest girlfriend on a stagey shopping trip. If the Eastwick gossips disapprove, then so be it.

Yet I need hardly tell you that the unearthly energies released by the arrangement would eventually destroy the coven's equilibrium. And apart from the thunderstorms, the first sign that all was not well among our witchy competitors for Simon's affections came earlier this week, when Sinitta took to the Wildean echo chamber that is her Twitter feed.

"Jackie St Claire," she tweeted, "stop telling people I'm having an affair with my dear friend Ian Wace, who is happily with Saffron Aldridge . . . stop lying NOW! You are the source of all the lies and wrong info."

Naturally, one's reaction was to try to contact Sinitta to warn her that her Twitter account appeared to have been hacked by a particularly dim 14-year-old girl too vulgar to do anything other than have her arguments in public. But before this was possible, madam was back on.

"I'm sorry after 25 years you still won't stop harassing and bullying," read the next communiqué. "I'm 41 and you 51 (years old). At 15 and 25 I was afraid of you, I'm not now!"

Well! For her part, Jackie was said to be "seething" and considering how to retaliate. Inevitably, Simon was asked to comment on events. "It was a pretty torrid day," he told the Daily Mirror of the ongoing hostilities. "Absolutely hellish . . . Am I getting involved with it all? That would be a no."

No? NO? Listen here, Cowell – you can't just swan into town, seduce the women, then affect amused Jack Nicholson-esque detachment when their rivalries flourish inevitably out of control.

This is bigger than that. Indeed, Lost in Showbiz has a theory, and is frankly baffled at being the first to advance it. But here goes: your X Factor darling Cheryl Tweedy did not catch malaria from a mosquito during her holiday in Tanzania. No, Cheryl was given malaria by the coven, who cast a spell to strike her down, just like the Eastwick witches in the original John Updike novel use their magic to give their sweet, innocent former friend cancer, because she has become the favourite of Darryl Van Horne.

Its movie analogue is, of course, the scene in which the prim little town busybody Felicia begins uncontrollably vomiting hundreds of the very cherry stones the witches are discarding at a soiree across town. I'm afraid it's all rather icky, and her husband has to murder her with a poker just to stop the unpleasantness.

Is this what you want, Cowell? Ashley Cole taking a poker to the nation's sweetheart, or at the very least texting her a picture of one? I realise your only cultural references are novelty records you've produced, and probably a biography of Louis B Mayer you got a quarter way through in 2005, but you may be assured this is serious. Eastwick is burning, you old devil – and the fires threaten to consume you.